Plain Sawn vs. Quarter Sawn

There are two ways that boards are commonly taken out of trees like this one, plain-sawn and quarter-sawn. I've got examples of each one here. Here's a plain-sawn board and you can see the big cathedral or flame pattern in the face. Here's a quarter-sawn board face looks quite a bit different. It's got a very straight grain to it. Additionally, it's got these flecks in it. Now let's have a look at a log and see how this actually works out for plain-sawn my first cut here is going to be right here through the center of the tree. Now, if I were continuing my plain-sawn process all I would have to do is keep cutting and cutting all the way up through to the edge of this log. Now, if I asked you to figure out a way to make these cuts a little bit thorough I bet you could do it. We could take this log, lay it on a saw mill and very easily cut a slab, cut a slab, cut a slab. And it'd be pretty easy to make these cuts and get these boards. That's plain-sawn quarter-sawn a little bit different and a quarter-sawn cut. We're going to come this way and literally start with a quarter here that we've taken off the log. Then another cut. Now here, things get a little tricky. I go this way. So now if we do the same exercise and I ask you to think about getting these quarter-sawn boards out of a board I bet you're going to think, Well, that's going to be a little bit harder to do. I got a quarter at first, then I've got to cut it turn it, cut it, turn it, cut it, turn it. So as a result, quarter- sawn material is more expensive than plain-sawn material. So a good question would be why would we bother messing with it? So let's start with our boards again, this plain-sawn board. Actually, when we look at the end grain of it really tells us the story here on the end grain we're looking at the annual rings of this board the annual rings in this case they're kind of in a frown shape. They're pointed down in a piece of wood. The wood has a tendency to cup in a direction opposite the annual rings. So this board with its rings pointed down would have a tendency to cup up. This board would have come out of the log, something like this. So if I take my marker and I draw in our annual rings for you to see, remember that we've got kind of a bullseye like this of annual rings going through the tree. So this board with its rings point to down with somewhere like this in the tree. Quarter-sawn material, let's start again by looking at the end grain. The end grain on this one, we can tell it's quarter-sawn. Cause the annual rings are about 90 degrees to the face instead of rounded. So I might ask you, well which way is this board going to cup? And I'm actually flipping a trick question there. This board's not going to cup because the annual rings are perpendicular to the face like that. Now the way this one came out of the way log would have been out here, some place where the annual rings are coming through like this. So this board is cut out here. Now, why would we do that? Well, the annual rings are going to help make this board more stable. So quarter-sawn material is much less prone to cupping and also less prone to expansion and contraction. The other thing that a lot of woodworkers like about it is that the grain on this piece is very, very straight. Remember on our plain-sawn piece had some big flame patterns to it, some big cathedral in it. The other thing we've got in this cause it's a piece of Oak are these flecks here in the wood. So if we got some more finish on here, especially a little bit of gloss to it, those flecks would become real. Three-dimensionally it really pop out of the wood. They're really cool looking a lot of woodworkers really like that. Now it's important to understand not every species of wood has the big flecks like the Oaks the red Oak and white Oak. They're very dramatic cherry. You're not really going to see much going on there. So as far as woods commonly quarter-sawn goes it's commonly the Oaks, the red Oak in the white Oak outside of that, you may or may not be able to find a species that you're looking for quarter-sawn outside of the Oaks. So those are our two conversion processes, plain-sawn, less expensive, but a less stable piece of material. Quarter-sawn, more expensive to produce, but more stable. We can take it one step further with quarter-sawn and define quarter-sawn and rift sawn. In quarter-sawn material, the annual rings hit the face grain at 90 degrees. If we come a little bit further out here on the circle our rifts on material is going to hit with the annual rings at about 30 to 60 degrees. So if I highlight one of our annual rings here. Our annual rings the way they're hitting the face would make this a rift sawn piece. There's a quarter-sawn piece. That'll give you a good understanding of how logs get converted into planks.